In the need of some carpets for our apartments, Tara and I ventured to the Carpet Souk here in Abu Dhabi this weekend!

There are a ton of shops and they all have pretty much the same carpets and from what we saw, if they don't have one in their store they will go to the next store and get one then bring it back, so how commission or sales work is a wonder. At the same time how they start off with prices is hard to understand too! You really have to bargain hard for a good price on these carpets.

Most of the carpets they have are from Turkey, Belgium, Iran and Afghanistan. I thought most of them would be Persian type carpets, but they had a wide variety of more modern ones as well.

They invite you into their shop and start pulling out carpets for you even when you say no no no! They will unroll the carpets and I think in one shop we had about 10 carpets rolled out on the floor for us...I think they expected us to buy, but we didn't..oh well!

We actually went next door to look for more and I ended up buying 2 there.

This is how it went:

Salesman: How much you want to pay?

Me: 500dhs (3.5 dhs is about $1)

Salesman: No no, I give you good price 1500dhs.

Me: Way too much, I have only 500dhs.

Salesman: Okay okay I give you good offer 1100dhs. lowest price...good price, you take?

Me: No no no, too expensive (As I start to leave the shop)

Salesman: Give me your best price, what do you want to pay..please tell me!

Me: I want to pay 500dhs....

Well about 20 minutes later, more bargaining and looking at other carpets, I not only took home 1 carpet, but found another one as well. He asked 900dhs to start for that one. He kept saying 'good price for you, you come back with your friends' too funny.

So in the end I got two carpets one for our living room and one for our front hall bargained down from his cost of 1500+900 to 500+200...wow now that's a discount.

Even then we probably could've gone lower, although not sure...seemed like a pretty good deal and really couldn't convince him to take only 600 dhs. Just feel bad if people actually do pay what they ask or even half of what they ask for!


They will still unroll the carpets even when you say No...this was one of them :)


Carpets of all sizes and colors